Haven't eaten it since I was 16 or so, but I loved toast (white bread) with ketchup and nutella (yes, spread on the same side, not like one half ketchup and the other half nutella)
Edit because it came to my mind: My girlfriend finds it really weird that I like to spread mayonnaise on my meat-bread (like proper bread with salami or other sliced meat sitting on top of mayonnaise)
My partner thinks it’s disgusting and my biggest red flag: I make peanut butter sandwiches on white bread and dip them in ranch dressing 😩 the reason I do this is because of growing up a millennial in NKY where a weekly lunch option was a bowl of chili, served with a peanut butter sandwich, and carrot sticks w a side of ranch….I hate raw carrots, always have lmao but I love all the other items….one day I was staring at the sad unused ranch and thinking as I was already keen to dipping the PB sandwich in the chili, that maybe it would be as good as the PB in chili so I tried it and I’ve just done it and liked a PB sandwich dipped in ranch ever since 😓 my partner has even tried it for me and hated it 🤷🏼♀️ at least they loved me enough to try it 🥹
I could imagine the sweet and salty goes well together. I like when a charcuterie has a nice jam and brie. A cracker or piece of bread with brie, prosciutto, and jam, I could eat so many of those.
Raw garlic, just once in a while, as a little treat. Sometimes I’ll mash it up in some bread but most often… plain, raw garlic.
I have also not met a single thing I won’t try to pickle at least once, and for some reason people around me think that it is Terrifying hahaha. Personally, I find pickling to be a fantastic way to rescue produce that’s otherwise about to go off. Instead of making food waste, I’m making delicious snacks and toppings. Pickle everything!
Pickle everything! I've come up with some pretty interesting pickles, and also ferments. Worst outcome is food that was going to go bad is bad. Best outcome is delicious surprise!
Ooh, experiments in fermentation are high on my list but I haven’t tried yet. Do you have any good tips for translating one’s pickling skills to fermentation? Or any fermentation tips in general - I’d love to know more about your process if you feel like sharing!
I feel like they're related in technique but have fundamentally different results. Pickling can enhance and sharpen flavours but fermentation, at least the salt anerobic kind, tends to mellow flavours. I found it helped to start with some pretty simple stuff. Just a single ingredient and salt (and water). It's Alive, the old Bon Apetit (booo!) show, has some really helpful starting recipies. Noma's guide to fermentation really emboldened my fermentation choices.
I got one of those fermentation kits of Amazon that has a couple of jar lids with a one-way valve, some glass fermentation weights, and a large syringe to pull air from the jar. I was much less worried about turning something poison with the added help from those tools.
My process is usually when something is going to go bad I put it in a jar I know the weight of, add a spice or something that may taste good then add water. Then weight it and calculate 2.5% salt of the item+spice+water. You can go lower than 2.5% but that's a pretty safe number. Then I'll look at it and taste it a couple weeks in, decide if it needs more time and keep going. Some things have a tipping point where all of a sudden they taste really different. Other things have a more linear progression.
Seems like fermentation takes a little more care than I expected, but not in a bad way! I hadn’t realized there were fermentation kits out there and I’m so glad to have gotten that information before I got excited one day and decided to just wing it. It’s also good to know I should probably be thinking of this more like baking than like cooking, since I’m gathering from your description that more precise measurements are called for to get the right result.
Thank you - I really appreciate you taking the time to write out this great advice!
I'm assuming you've had pickled garlic, then? I just picked up 2 jars of it recently. I have to stop myself from eating too much sometimes. Raw garlic is great for me when I have a bad cold and need to clear out my sinuses.
I have, and I'm with you - pickled garlic is so good. I also love that it's super easy to toss in a few (or more than a few) cloves of garlic alongside whatever else is going in the pickle jar, or to put them in some leftover brine after the original batch of pickles is finished.
Since you mentioned liking raw garlic for your sinuses when you have a cold, have you ever tried saving the brine from your pickled garlic for similar purposes? If not, I'd highly recommend it. I've found that sipping or gargling pickle brine works wonders when I need some relief from a sore throat, and if the vinegar is strong enough I've found it helps my sinuses as well.
I happen to be suffering from a sore throat right now from horrible allergies, so I'll have to remember to try this as soon as I get home.
As far as other pickled things, I ironically hate pickled cucumbers, but I love pickled eggs and pickled garlic and have been curious to try some other unconventional pickled foods.
I hope that the brine helped you with your sore throat!
For other non-cucumber pickles, a great way to dip your toes in might be pickled onion (I like red onion best for this, but that’s my personal preference), or pickled carrots. Both of these make excellent toppings for sandwiches of all kinds, tacos, poke, basically anything that could use a little acid or some extra crunch
I’m also quite partial to pickled cauliflower and pickled beets for general snacking
My girlfriend and her entire family think I'm an alien for drinking milk whenever I have popcorn. It doesn't even register as a strange combination to me. I think they're very complementary flavors.
My friend recommended eating kiwis with the skin on. It takes a second to get used to the fuzzy skin, but they are SOOOO much easier to eat! Plus you get some extra fiber ;)
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